Memorial to the former Jewish citizens of Herzogenrath
Denkmal für die ehemaligen jüdischen Bürger aus Herzogenrath
Since 2004 the »Memorial to the former Jewish citizens of Herzogenrath« remembers the town's Jewish citizens who were expelled and murdered during the National Socialism regime.
History
Herzogenrath borders on the Dutch town of Kerkrade in the west and Aachen in the south. Prior to the outbreak of the Second World War Herzogenrath had a population of around 7,700, among them a few Jewish families. Herzogenrath had no Synagogue of its own, most of the Herzogenrath Jews attended the Aachen synagogue.
During the National Socialist regime Jewish life in Herzogenrath was completely destroyed. Like elsewhere in Germany Jews were gradually excluded from public life, disenfranchised and their livelihood destroyed. A source from 1936 says that »the Jewish butcher August Rubens from Herzogenrath was taken into protective custody because of antisocial behaviour and the closure of his business was ordered«. The majority of the Rubens family was deported to the occupied east and murdered there during the war years. A similar fate befell most of the Jewish families from Herzogenrath, very few were able to escape abroad in time.
On June 10, 1942 the citizens of Herzogenrath witnessed a group of at least 100 Jewish prisoners being chased from the train station through the town by the SS. Destination of the forced march were two provisional camps in neighbouring Würselen. From there the prisoners were deported to the east a few weeks later.
Victims
Prior to the Second World War about 35 Jews lived in Herzogenrath. Some emigrated but many met a violent death during the Holocaust. After the war no Jews lived in the town any more.
The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority.
With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany.
Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war.
In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives.
Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals.
The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.
Remembrance
On November 9, 2004 the »Memorial to the former Jewish citizens of Herzogenrath« was inaugurated in front of the Herzogenrath town hall. The memorial is made of natural stone with a hole in the form of a Star of David sawn into it, which, according to the artists Stefanie Weskott and Werner Huppertz-Weskott, indicates the »irretrievable loss« caused by the Holocaust. The pedestal bears the inscription »In memory to the exclusion, disenfranchisement, eviction, deportation and murder of the Jewish citizens of Herzogenrath«. The initiative for the memorial was started by the Herzogenrath workgroup »Wege gegen das Vergessen (Ways against Oblivion)« founded in 1993 and which fought for the preservation of the memory of the town's former Jewish citizens.
Apart from the memorial in front of the town hall the workgroup carried through the erection of a plaque in memory of the forced march of Jewish prisoners in June 1942 and the laying of more than 20 »Stolpersteine (Tripping Stones)« mentioning Herzogenrath victims of the Holocaust by name. In the process numerous biographies of former Jewish citizens of Herzogenrath were researched in great detail.
